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2009-10-09

Obama: Nobel Peace Laureate?

Yes folks, the Nobel Peace Prize committee has awarded President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize (Karl Ritter and Matt Moore, AP).It's a strange choice, if you ask me.I like President Obama, and while there are certainly a lot of things he could be doing better, I think he's going in the right general direction.That said, what has Obama done to deserve this? The nomination was sent in less than a month into his presidency!Though Obama has taken a lot of steps to try to make the world a better place, such as reductions in nuclear weapons and calls for settlement freezes and peace treaties between Israel and the Palestinian territories, the people he has called on around the world to work with him have not reciprocated. Russia has put pressure on the US on the nuclear issue, Israel refuses to freeze settlements, and China is threatening the US with economic harm if it meets with one of the most recognizable messengers of peace in the world - the Dalaï Lama.Some of the people who have supported the prize, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have done so in the hopes that it would encourage further peace-building.What?Shouldn't the Peace Prize be given to people who have already done a plethora of work towards global peace rather than be an encouragement for such actions?Furthermore, there's a lot of domestic opposition to his attempts to further the cause of peace, arguing that he is an appeaser (he is to the Israelis on the issues of settlement freezes (versus his own previous tough stance) and to the Chinese on meeting with the Dalaï Lama, but otherwise, he is only an appeaser when compared to the super-hard-line Bush).So why did he get the prize again? I'm sure that there were plenty more people who have already done a lot of work to further the cause of global peace.